Crime for Christmas: Five favourite festive reads

Crime for Christmas: Five Festive Reads: here they are in order of publication

Dorothy L Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934).

Ok, so not Christmas exactly, but close enough. It is a snowy New Year’s Eve when Lord Peter Wimsey runs his car into a ditch near the village of Fenchurch St Paul. I regularly reread this, only skipping the tedious stuff about the cypher, to meet again the delightful Vicar Reverend Venables, and his wife Agnes, the power behind the throne. Like so many of the best crime novels it is about so much more than a crime and that’s why I can go back to it again and again. I love the depiction of the Fenland community with its magnificent East Anglian wool church. And the novel has one of the best endings in crime fiction. All in all, great comfort reading

Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot’s Christmas) (1938)

 I picked this up from my mother’s book shelf some years ago when I had a long wait on a cold December day while a tyre was replaced on my car. Sitting in the dreary waiting room and suffering from a cold, I was very grateful to Agatha Christie. Multi-millionaire Simeon Lee unexpectedly invites his family to gather at his home for Christmas. Virtually everyone dislikes him for one reason or another and he makes the mistake of announcing that he is going to change his will, the cue for a baffling locked room murder. I was thoroughly bamboozled.

Clifford Witting, Catt Out of the Bag (1939)

A great set-up: how, where and why did a man disappear from a group of carol singers on that cold December night in Paulsfield? It hardly seems likely that he has absconded with the collecting box. But the more that Inspector Charlton finds out about the missing person, the less certain he is that he will fnd him alive … We learn all about the people in the houses on the carol singers’ route as Inspector Charlton goes about unravelling the case. There is even a map – always a welcome feature in a GA novel.

Cyril Hare, An English Murder (1951)

Another  absolute classic. A snow-bound country house with an impoverished dying peer, a disaffected fascist heir, a loyal butler, and an ill-assorted collection of guests, including the leftwing Chancellor of the Exchequer and his police bodyguard. A murder is committed (for, it turns out, a very unusual motive) and it is the delightful Dr Bottwink,  a scholar and a refugee doing research in the muniment room of Warbeck Hall, who solves the crime.

Martin Edwards,  Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife (2025)

 OK, not Golden Age, like my other reads, except that in spirit it is just that. There is even a clue-finder and a map: great stuff! I always have the comforting feeling when I begin a Martin Edwards novel that I am in for a treat and this is no exception. Here a disparate group of people, united only by their different connections to the world of crime fiction, are stranded in a snowbound village. They have been invited there to play a murder mystery game – and the readers is invited to solve the puzzles they encounter along the way – but soon there is a real murder and it’s clear that there is a killer in their midst …

You might like to add your own favourites?

And finally I wish a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to my readers. May the year ahead be full of books and reading.